e trout in their own homes without having to wait for
hours till they condescend to rise to the fly you've been dangling before
them; and an elegant svelte figure--"

"Think of the otter hounds," interposed Amanda; "how dreadful to be
hunted and harried and finally worried to death!"

"Rather fun with half the neighbourhood looking on, and anyhow not worse
than this Saturday-to-Tuesday business of dying by inches; and then I
should go on into something else. If I had been a moderately good otter
I suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probably
something rather primitive--a little brown, unclothed Nubian boy, I
should think."

"I wish you would be serious," sighed Amanda; "you really ought to be if
you're only going to live till Tuesday."

As a matter of fact Laura died on Monday.

"So dreadfully upsetting," Amanda complained to her uncle-in-law, Sir
Lulworth Quayne. "I've asked quite a lot of people down for golf and
fishing, and the rhododendrons are just looking their best."

"Laura always was inconsiderate," said Sir Lulworth; "she was born during
Goodwood week, with an Ambassador staying in the house who hated babies."

"She had the maddest kind of ideas," said Amanda; "do you know if there
was any insanity in her family?"

"Insanity? No, I never heard of any. Her father lives in West
Kensington, but I believe he's sane on all other subjects."

"She had an idea that she was going to be reincarnated as an otter," said
Amanda.

"One meets with those ideas of reincarnation so frequently, even in the
West," said Sir Lulworth, "that one can hardly set them down as being
mad. And Laura was such an unaccountable person in this life that I
should not like to lay down definite rules as to what she might be doing
in an after state."

"You think she really might have passed into some animal form?" asked
Amanda. She was one of those who shape their opinions rather readily
from the standpoint of those around them.

Just then Egbert entered the breakfast-room, wearing an air of
bereavement that Laura's demise would have been insufficient, in itself,
to account for.

"Four of my speckled Sussex have been killed," he exclaimed; "the very
four that were to go to the show on Friday. One of them was dragged away
and eaten right in the middle of that new carnation bed that I've been to
such trouble and expense over. My best flower bed and my best fowls
singled out for destruction; it almost se